Doing Data Stuff With Other Humans

Tag: Area Maps

Some new features and updates to Vysda are on their way! Check out what you’ll be seeing very soon from us! We’re passionate about data visualization and want to keep bringing you improvements and as always, Vysda is a free-to-use social site for seasoned data practitioners and novices alike!

New Additions-Data Importing from Web Pages

How often do you need work on data from a web page? Copying structured data from a web page can be problematic. Most people use Excel to copy and paste but this is an extra manual step. As part of a new feature in the Data Wizard, you can now simply copy/paste the URL and Vysda will import the data for you. It even handles multiple tables on a web page!

Data Wrangler Tool

When you upload new data to Vysda, it often needs some cleaning and transformation. You may need to remove unnecessary columns, rename headers, re-format data, split and restructure columns, etc. All this work can now be done using the new data wrangler tool. Data columns can be wrangled individually or collectively and all actions (which are recorded in the Action History) can be undone with ease.

Animation

Animation can now be added to many of the current types of visualizations available on the Vysboard! Through the new animation tab for each visualization type, you’ll be able to enable and configure animations. By doing so, you will be able to render a video showing time progression, a comparison of ideas, or to highlight trends.

Cartogram and Other New Maps

Standard area maps are great to visualize data against a geographic area. For example, population data can be represented through shading each state on a map. But states with smaller areas, like Rhode Island, are often difficult to see. A Cartogram map type is a solution for this issue. Cartograms represent each geographic area by a geometric object with its size proportional to the data. Hence the bigger the data, the bigger the object’s size. Here is a Cartogram example using squares.

Another variation of the Cartogram that we’ll be adding is the Tile Map. Here are a few examples of how this map type can look:

We’ll also be adding several other new types of charts and diagrams like Route Maps, Radar Charts, Bump Diagrams, and Density Maps to refresh the ways in which you can use Vysda to visualize your data!

More on the Horizon…

After the Beta 4 release, we’ll begin work right away on Beta 5. More improvements and enhancements are on their way!

We’ve been working hard to keep bringing new updates and features to Vysda! As always, a free-to-use data tool and socializing platform. We’ve got a lot of plans for the distant future but the near is here so here’s what’s coming next week!

Area Maps

Good for comparing proportions over geographic regions, this new map type will display circles over designated areas with the size of the circle being proportional to its value in the dataset.

This map type offsets issues caused by regional area size in cases where geographically large areas overwhelm the visual communication of the data message (as can happen when using Choropleth maps).

Example of our area map feature showing Emergency Response Incidents in NYC over the past few years.

Route Maps

This map type is great for showing geographic connections and relationships through lines connecting points. Interesting spatial patterns can be revealed through the distribution of connections or by how concentrated the connections are on a map. This map is also particularly useful for displaying routes through a single chain of links.

Example of our route map feature based on data that tracked the routes traveled by Hurricanes for the 2009 and 2010 seasons.

Bump Charts

The criss-crossing lines of this chart are very useful for comparing the changes in rank of a value over a time, place, or other relevant dimension to the analysis. A crossing, or ‘bump,’ necessarily means one entity has surpassed the other entity in absolute terms, even though we are looking at the relative rank. Bump charts are often very useful for sports data in comparing teams or players over seasons.

Example of our bump chart feature showing the EPL season standings from 1992-2015.

Fun Lil’ Nuggets We’re Adding

Finally, along with smashing some bugs and implementing a few UI enhancements, we’re going to be releasing the ability to share directly with Reddit and support for EMOTICONS.

Looking Towards That Not So Distant Future…

After the Beta 3 release, we’re going to go straight into our Beta 4 to do list. Now, just between you and me on the DL, a few of the big features we’ll be working on for Beta 4 include a data scrubbing tool, scheduled data refreshes, smart suggestions for datasets on the Vysboard, support for new diagram types, and animation for charts and graphs. So stay tuned and keep mining- there be buried treasure in all those data piles! arrrgh!